The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

  She remembers, though, and Brady knows who she is. Sometimes she thinks he only lets her stay because she spends most of her time and all of her money in here.

  As she pushes open the door to the ladies’ room—it’s still in the same place in relation to the bar, though the pool table disappeared back in the eighties to make way for a salad bar—she glances at the seated man’s back. His hair is short, not long, and gray, not black. His shoulders are hunched instead of straight and proud. But she could never forget that profile. And as he lifts the whiskey glass to his lips, she knows it’s the very first time he’s taken a drink in this place.

  She sits in the cubicle, a woman pushing sixty who is feeling as excited and giddy as that girl who’d hidden away forty years before. She’d known he was being released, because there was a small piece about it in the local rag a week before. It concentrated on old Meredith Bellows, whose son had his brains smashed out across the bar with an ashtray.

  And then she decides it’s time to go out and see him. There’s something she has to ask, the same question that was on her mind when she cowered here many years earlier.

  She takes a deep breath, pushes the door open, and approaches the bar.

  She waited in the toilet cubicle for quite some time, listening to the screaming and shooting and the wet thudding sounds of him smashing someone’s brains out. She was shivering and sweating, and it took a while for her to pluck up the courage to open the door and go back out. He’s a gentleman, she thought. He won’t come into the ladies’ room, so I’ll have to go out there to him. She imagined the look on his face when he finally saw her, the recognition of identical pain, and she hoped she’d see the bullet coming.

  She crept to the door and placed her ear against it, frowning. No more gunshots.

  “Fear me!” he shouted, and her knees went weak again and she pissed herself, just a little. She grabbed the door handle and twisted, and then she heard the muffled sound of police loudhailers. When she opened the door it creaked, letting in the stench of blood and shit and insides turned out.

  To begin with she couldn’t see him, he was standing so still. There were bodies splayed around the bar, only bodies, no one moving, and gun smoke hung in the air in place of cigarette smoke, butts now extinguished by vomit and blood. The pool table was red. O’Malley grinned bloody and dead from behind the bar.

  Then she saw him, and he saw her, and he lifted his gun and smiled.

  “Do I know you?” she asks.

  He sighs, but doesn’t turn around. “Mind if I take a seat?”

  Still no answer.

  Shaking, sweating, more nervous than she’s ever been before, she pulls out the bar stool next to his and sits down. And then she gets a proper look at his hands. They’ve been mutilated, fingers cut off below the second knuckle, leaving only the index finger and thumb on his right hand. The wounds look old and gnarled, and necessitate him picking up his glass with a delicate, almost formal precision.

  “Why didn’t you kill me?” she whispers.

  He freezes completely. He stops breathing, his eyes glaze over, and his one remaining thumb halts the gentle tattoo it has been playing against the bar top. She believes then that if she exhales across his head, her alcohol breath will not even shift one of his short hairs. He’s paused in time between blinks and breaths, and she wonders what she has done.

  Then he turns slowly to look at her and recognition dawns. It brings little emotion with it. Regret, maybe, for not killing her . . . or at least she hopes that’s what the sadness means. No surprise, no shock that she should be here waiting for him after forty years, but of course not, because they’re made of the same flesh and blood now, aren’t they?

  “Why?” she prompts.

  He blinks, then turns back to the bar and lifts the glass to his lips. Draining it in one go, he places it on the bar again and goes to leave. “Wait!” she says. She grabs his arm. He looks down at her hand and she lets go, ashamed of her presumptuous contact. “Please!”

  “I recall that’s just what you said last time we met.” He walks away from her towards the door, and she sees Brady watching the old man go, a confused frown twisting his face.

  “I have no free will!” she shouts. He stops then, halfway to the door, and every other patron in the bar looks at her, and at him. He’s the center of attention in that place again, but this time no one knows why. Not even Brady, who has a place on the wall around the corner of the bar where he keeps photographs of everyone the man killed that day in what Brady says is in honor but which she knows is just a twisted way to try and attract more attention to the slaughter . . . not even Brady knows his face.

  “And you think that makes us the same?” he asks softly.

  She nods. Holds up her hands, trying clumsily to bend down her fingers, fisting them in so that he can see himself reflected in her.

  He scoffs, comes back to the bar and sits beside her again. She can barely believe this is happening. He came back and she almost lost him again, and now here he is sitting beside her on purpose, ordering another drink, and this time it’s a large one.

  “You?” he asks, nodding at her glass. She cannot speak, and it’s lucky that Brady knows her usual.

  She looks at the side of his head. If he’d sat on the other side she wouldn’t have seen, and maybe he’s done it on purpose, because now she’s sure she can make out the subtle, circular barrel burn. He’s showing me, she thinks. He wants me to see. He takes a casual drink and looks at himself in the bar mirror, and she lets herself think that for a while longer.

  That smile, she thought, because there was something familiar in there, something knowing and understanding, a mad grin that she could see through to the level certainties possessed by the killer on the other side.

  She reached out one tentative hand past the doorjamb, keeping the rest of her body hidden away. Like a shy naked woman wearing a mask, she thought, and his grin widened as he pressed the barrel of the gun hard against his temple.

  He turned away from her then, staring at the bar’s shattered front window. He didn’t waste a bullet. She counted the shots in her mind and the bodies sprawled motionless or twitching before her. A bullet must have passed right through one of O’Malley’s patrons, and she wondered whose blood it was speckling a thousand shards of glass on the sidewalk outside.

  He took one step forward, and the mechanized police voices grew louder.

  “Please!” she said. Please don’t do it please don’t go please kill me. She wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, but that one word attracted his glance again.

  “Drop your weapon and come out! Keep your hands above your head!”

  “Please,” she said again, because now the man was utterly motionless, his eyes half closed and his hand still holding the gun to his temple. Then he seemed to come to a decision. He looked at her and grinned again, dropped the gun, and walked from the bloodied bar.

  Something slumped within her. She might have been fooled that it was a sense of relief, but she knew herself too well for that, had dis- covered things about herself while bent over behind this place letting the latest bad boy have her, walking through the dismal town at noon with false smiles veering away, sitting alone in her parents’ house because they’d died and left her only with her own damaged self. It wasn’t relief she felt, but sadness. Sadness that this moment had passed, and it had been the best of her life. Nothing that followed could ever equal this. Her heart was thundering, blood pulsed at her ears, and the door swung closed behind him. There was shouting and the scraping of feet across the sidewalk, but that was somewhere else.

  She looked down at the gun he’d used. It was big and long, the barrel thicker than most guns she’d seen. It had landed pointing at her, spilled blood from fat Vincent West running into a floorboard joint and not quite touching it. She stared into its mouth and knew it would fire no more.

  “Anyone left alive in there?” a scared voice called. One of the young cops from the town, younger t
han her.

  No, she thought, no one alive in here, and she walked toward the gun.

  It was still warm as she clasped her hand around the barrel. She closed her eyes and breathed in the gun smoke, distinguishing it from the blood and insides because it was pure and honest, not tainted and sick. The gun was heavy and hard in her hand. She was feeling her death, and inside this thing was the bullet that should have penetrated her and brought her everything she wanted.

  She began to wonder, and the door burst open.

  “We’ve got a live one!” the cop shouted, and she almost laughed at the deluded young fool.

  “I can’t believe you came back,” she says.

  “I can’t believe you’re still here.”

  “Where else would I go?”

  He shrugs and glances at her. His eyes aren’t what they use to be. Not dead, exactly, but . . . tempered. Something has sucked that extravagant life from him and left him normal.

  “I kept your gun,” she says.

  “No you didn’t.” He frowns at her, and almost looks unsettled. She glances down at her hand and remembers the heat of the barrel. Her skin is old and creased now, yellowed by smoke and made thin by decades of alcohol abuse. She can almost see her blood flowing, and it mocks her.

  “What happened to your fingers?” she asks. “Prison?”

  “Prison.” He picks up his glass again, a difficult movement that is nevertheless confident. She wonders how he can do everything that needs doing with only two fingers.

  “Why did they do it?”

  “They didn’t. I did.” He falls quiet as Brady walks past them behind the bar, casting a curious glance at the mutilated man. He looks at her too, and she feigns drunkenness so she doesn’t have to focus. This is my moment, she thinks, don’t fuck it up, Brady. She remembers the man blasting O’Malley in the throat and the musical jingle of glass that accompanied the echo, and smiles.

  “You did it to yourself.”

  “One finger for everyone in the bar that day,” he says, lifting his fingerless left hand. “I was countin’.”

  She frowns and starts going over all the names she knows. She can barely remember their voices or faces any more, their personalities or what they meant to her, but their names are as familiar as this man’s face in her dreams. She counts, and quickly passes ten.

  “I stopped,” he says. “Started cutting, then lost my nerve. Had to have something left, didn’t I? Drink, wipe my ass, jerk off. Surprising how much you can do with just a thumb and index finger.” He drinks some more, and she stares at his stumps.

  “Get you another?” Brady asks. He’s been hovering.

  “ ’Nother double. And one for the lady.” Brady pours their drinks.

  “Have you come back to finish things?” she asks, because it’s pressing, this need to know. She hasn’t waited forty years to die, but the memory of how she felt back then is suddenly fresh and sharp.

  “Why so keen to die?” he asks, once Brady is out of earshot. He actually leans closer to her, turning to face her fully for the first time, and his stale breath is as familiar to this place as gun smoke. “If I’d done you back then, think of all you’d’ve missed.”

  “All I would have missed,” she says, and she tries to hold back the bitter laughter. There must have been good times, but Max catches her eye then and tries to wink, and he’s far too drunk and he does so with both eyes. He doesn’t open them again; drifts off, slumps sideways, snoring. “All I would have missed.” She looks around the bar at the other patrons, a few of whom she recognizes. Funny, how someone can drink in the same place with the same people for so long and never exchange a word with them. The old black woman who always sits by the door, keeps her hat on and a scarf around her neck, just about to leave as she polishes off most of a bottle of whiskey. The younger guy in the back, nursing a half-full glass for hours on end because he only ever has enough begging money for one. She gave him a hand job in the men’s toilet once, but she has never known his name.

  “You don’t know what you did to me back then,” she says, suddenly bitter. “You left me that day, abandoned me, and I was between blinks. Between breaths.” Her voice is rising. “I was winded by what I saw and what you did to me—”

  “Lady, I didn’t do anythin’ to you.”

  “Yes!” she shouts, and then Brady is there telling her to can it. She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply

  . . . and the gun smoke had started to clear. She sat on a stool by the bar as the medics checked her over, and the police stared dumbfounded at what they’d walked in on, and a detective fired questions at her that she could not hear. They mumbled some soothing words from which she took no comfort at all, then someone grabbed her arm and guided her outside.

  The sun hit her. She hadn’t even known it was daylight. Every breath she took belonged to someone else. Every step along the sidewalk was somewhere she was never meant to go. She was living on borrowed time, and payback would not come for many, many years.

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  “It’s okay, Ma’am, he can’t hurt you—”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s being taken to the—”

  “Where is he?”

  A pause. “He’s gone.”

  “Where is he?”

  They stopped answering her then, but she didn’t stop asking. She never stopped asking.

  He takes another drink, and this time she buys the round. Brady is becoming suspicious; he knows something is happening, but he can’t tell what. He hates that in his own bar. He thinks he’s the king.

  “So why have you come back?” she asks.

  “Not for what you think.”

  “What is it you think I think?”

  He laughs. It’s not the sound made by a mass murderer. “Lady,” he says, “you’re an open book.”

  “You owe me,” she says, and she’s holding back the tears. “You stole something from me, and you owe me. I didn’t lie, you know. I have no free will, ’cause you stole it back then. With everything I saw, everything you did . . . I was only a girl!”

  “I spared your life.” He’s almost sneering now, or perhaps his face is distorted through her tears. Then he leans in close and says, “And I knew very well what I was doing.”

  “What? What?” But he has gone. She watches him leave and goes to follow, but she falls from the stool, burning her elbows on the polished floor. Brady has come around the bar and he’s helping her up, and the stupid fucking idiot still doesn’t know, still doesn’t understand who’s been sitting at his bar drinking his best whiskey.

  “That was him,” she says.

  “Who?” Brady asks.

  And she leaves it at that, because perhaps he’d been a ghost after all.

  She leaves the bar and stands outside. From the sidewalk the Slaughter- house looks like any one of a hundred bars in a hundred cities. There’s nothing to show what happened in there, and though the façade is almost the same as it was back then, the new windows and paintwork have given it more of an upbeat feel. Its face is as different as hers, except that this place now looks even younger. She stares at herself in its window, her image vague and insubstantial, and she is old. The massacre she witnessed has not been all her life is about, but it has been a large part of it. She’s made that so. Much as she tried to lay responsibility on his stooping shoulders, she has no one to blame but herself.

  Someone inside the bar returns to their seat with a drink—Max, or the old woman—and their image seems to ripple through her own reflection.

  Maybe I’ve been in there ever since, she thinks. Maybe he shot me before he pressed the gun’s hot barrel to his temple. The idea has occurred to her a thousand times over the years, but now that she’s seen what he has become it takes on a convincing weight. Would he really have turned into something like that anywhere other than in her haunted dreams? Would a man so tall and proud and handsome, so full of vitality and purpose, have done that to himself? The barrel wou
ld have cooled down too much to burn him, wouldn’t it . . . unless he’d fired it one more time before turning the empty gun on himself? She closes her eyes and tries to remember the bullet coming for her, and when she opens them again and looks along the street, she sees him.

  He is walking slowly, as if his unbalanced hands mess with his stability. People weave around him like they would a drunk, but he isn’t drunk. Maybe they see him for what he is. Perhaps they know him like she does.

  She turns and walks the other way, because even if she hurries to catch up, he can never be what she wants. I have no free will, she said, and she feels fate directing her still. It held her in its grasp for four decades, preparing her for the here and now. It makes her crave the slick feel of hot gun metal in her hand, and when she’s too drunk to travel to the range, she makes do with cold.

  Time pulling her toward home, she leaves O’Malley’s behind for the last time. It became the Slaughterhouse many years ago. Lining the street, she sees plenty of other places ready to change their names.

  The author of more than two-dozen novels and many works of short fiction, Tim Lebbon won the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction for his short story “Reconstructing Amy” and his novel Dusk won the August Derleth Award from the British Fantasy Society for best novel. His novelization of the movie 30 Days of Night became a New York Times bestseller and won a Scribe Award. His most recent novels are Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void and Reaper’s Legacy. He lives in Goytre, Monmouthshire with his wife and two children.

  Science and magic together are more powerful, are greater weapons, than they are apart . . .